Lutetia asteroid, illustration. Lutetia is a large, rocky object currently located between Mars and Jupiter. It's unusual spectral properties indicate that Lutetia started life as a fragment of the material that was forming the inner planets. It is shown here in the early history of the Solar System passing close to one of the very young rocky planets about four billion years ago. This interaction may have drastically altered the orbit of Lutetia and contributed to it's current position in the asteroid belt much further out from the Sun. The Rosetta probe passed within 3,162 km of Lutetia in July 2010.